


Valid Question

by Galaxxi



Category: Transformers Generation One
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, Platonic Relationships, Universe Alteration, aka i like drawing tracks with glasses and decided to make an explanation for it too
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-22
Updated: 2019-05-22
Packaged: 2020-02-04 12:35:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,900
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18604645
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Galaxxi/pseuds/Galaxxi
Summary: ... What's a highly advanced giant alien robot doing with *glasses*, anyway?





	Valid Question

**Author's Note:**

> back at it again with that self-indulgent tracks & raoul content nobody asked for but i'm here to provide anyway because there is a very saddening lack of it in this fandom. (this is my third TF fic lately and all of them involve characters i love having a bad day lksfdjklsjdf ill post fluff soon at some point,,,) anyway like the tags say, i love love love tracks with glasses (thank you TFA for introducing me to the concept) and decided to explain it as more than just an artist design choice. there's more notes at the bottom for when you finish reading but i hope you enjoy, kudos and comments of *any* variation always appreciated :]c

    “If I didn't know better, I'd say _she_ got dressed in the dark. Who in the galaxy actually wears leggings as pants?? Let alone with _that_ pattern…”

    The duo were sitting in a garage, people-watching the inhabitants of New York from one side of the large front window. The larger blue mech adjusted his glasses to get a better view of their current target, scoffing and leaning slightly sideways towards the human beside him, not noticing his gaze was up on the Autobot and not the fashion disaster in question.

    “Really Raoul, I think that's the worst one we've seen today.”

    “Huh? Oh, right.”

    Tracks looked down to his friend, only catching the brief turn of his head away from him and the swing of his long, curly black hair across the back of his tan jacket as he brought his attention from the mech next to him back out to the scurrying pedestrians.

    “Something the matter?” He asked, leaning forward.

    Raoul shifted, lowering his legs to a crossed position and running his fingers through his hair. Finally he looked back up at the mech, head tilted and an eyebrow raised.

    “I was just wondering… How'd that happen? The glasses, I mean. Isn't one of the perks of being a robot that you could just… repair your eyes or your optics or whatever?”

    Tracks dropped his head slightly, rubbing at the back of his helm. Cybertronians and humans were alike in many aspects, but at the same time they were very different, and this wasn't the first time one of them had assumed something of his species’ biology based on their own culture's understanding of robots and machines. Raoul especially was known to have many such questions.

    “Not… exactly. You see, our biology isn't as simple as a lot of you seem to think, though it _would_ be nice if that were the case. I'll get to that, though. To answer your first question I was on Cybertron some time before ever even _hearing_ of Earth..."

\---

    The air was thick with yelling, smoke, and blaster fire, scorched shards of metallic ground scattering upon impact with the energy beams that missed their targets. His footsteps were quick but tired and heavy as he ran, clutching his silver blaster to his chest. A bot fell to his right who he didn’t recognize, but all he could do in the moment was hope it wasn’t one of their own and be thankful it wasn't him turning gunmetal gray as the form struck the ground. A bright purple bolt of energy came shooting towards him, and he barely had time to fling himself violently to the left. It only missed his shoulder by a micrometer but still missed him, and something exploded behind him just as he landed behind a large chunk of destroyed debris. It was charred, smoking, and broken now, but at one point it might have been the side of a nice building or a statue. Everything was far too chaotic for him to make sense of what might have been. It was unimportant, all that mattered now was that the surroundings had been turned into a vicious, unforgiving battlefield; another casualty of the Autobot-Decepticon war.

    With one hand he pushed himself up and sat crouched behind the scorched slab, and as he did he caught sight of the new scrapes and dings across his legs, no doubt caused from the debris of the last explosion that was too close for comfort. Every second mattered on the battlefield and he knew he shouldn't have been inspecting such minor damage so closely, but he couldn't help it. They weren’t deep enough to break any lines but the cosmetic injuries to his paint job still irked him. Some bots took pride in their battle damage, but not Tracks. He was much happier when he looked like he’d never seen battle in his entire life, pristine as ever and not a scratch on him. At least such minor aesthetic damage could be repaired quite easily, but it was more convenient to avoid it at _all -_ his time was valuable and fleeting in this war, and he would rather spend it polishing his paint than repairing it. Staying this pretty in war time was difficult enough, with resources being hard to come by and frivolous commodities being much more so.

    The blasts and shouting continued as he mulled over the thought before remembering he was in the middle of a war. Blasts continued to pick away at his surroundings, shooting off pieces of his cover before it finally stopped. Taking his chance and rolling to his left, he pulled his weapon and managed to return one, two, three, four vengeful blasts from his own rifle before an electrical _pop_ sounded right next to his audio receptor and a tremendous pain burned in his right wing.

    He cried out in pain as he swung back behind cover, hitting his back on the cold rigid debris, a sharp metallic scrape almost lost to the blaster fire as he struck the surface and slid down slightly, catching the smoke trail in front of his vision from his injury. The position he was in as he returned fire left his wing vulnerable, sticking out from the debris just enough to be an easy target for some lucky Decepticon across the field. They'd blasted a hole clean through the far end of it, the red ailerons now charred and hanging loosely from their hinges as all their sensitive electronics sparked around the wound. Glowing energon spilled from broken fuel lines and trailed in ribbons down the smooth metal, collecting under the wing and dripping to the ground. Ohh, getting wing repairs _especially_ was never fun…

    “Tracks, look out!” Someone called, but the stinging pain distracted him long enough for the warning to come too late. Up was unfortunately the _last_ direction he looked, and the last thing he saw before it all abruptly went black was the whistling white and purple missile coming down at him all too quickly from the starry sky.

\---

    Quite some time later, blue optics flickered on, static lingering briefly in his vision before the color channels aligned themselves and the static cleared. The farther corners of his vision didn’t come into focus as his gaze drifted lazily across the ceiling, testing the blurry boundaries between dazed blinks. Through the thin, clear strip of vision he had in the center of his view he could make out orange panels, wires scarcely running along them, meeting power boxes and junctions as they ran their own paths. The faint cast of a flickering light stretched across the ceiling.

    Grunting, he sat up, putting his hand to his helm as his senses came to him and dizziness followed. His hand dragged down his face and snagged something peculiar, something that wasn't there before. With two fingers he plucked the strange accessory from his face and pulled it away to get a better look.

    A thin, black wire frame held two long, rectangular, blue-tinted pieces of a transparent material that gleamed slightly and reflected their surroundings, as well as the bot inspecting them so curiously. They were conjoined in the middle where the wire frame met a small bridge sporting two magnetic facial grips on either side.

    Glasses.

    Why in all the galaxy did he have-

    “Well, look who decided to wake up. Hope you enjoyed your beauty nap, Tracks, you looked like you needed it.”

    Ignoring the jab, his head shot up and, upon seeing the incredibly blurry white and red mass, his optics widened. Placing the glasses back on his face with shaky hands, the blob focused, now taking the shape of their medic - Ratchet.

    And then his spark sank.

    “What happened to me? Why do I-”

    “Your optical sensors sustained moderate indirect damage from the blast, and they're incredibly hard to replace. Lucky for _you_ I managed to repair some of the damage, but not all of it. Your long range vision was significantly impaired so you'll have to deal with the sight aid - glasses - until we have the resources to replace them completely. Thanks to this spark-forsaken _war,_ though, who knows when that will be…”

    The thought of optical replacement surgery made him uneasy. All those tools digging into his pretty face, not to mention -

    “Although, with how particular you are about your looks, I'm not sure how you'd take to prosthetic optics - war or not we can only synthesize them in yellow, not blue. If it were _me_ I'd suck it up, but you obviously wouldn't accept them so kindly.”

    “And _glasses_ are so much better? I look like a loser!”

    “Would you rather be blind? They're not that bad, you look fine. For what it's worth you can still see just fine in vehicle mode, that's a completely different optical channel that wasn't affected by the blast.”

    Ratchet went on about how he repaired the nasty hole in his wing and how cosmetic imperfections such as the light scratches and the mismatched, unpainted new metal on his right wing weren't his problem, but all Tracks could do was focus on the unasked for change to his appearance. He looked just fine _before_ the glasses, in fact he looked _perfect._ But _now?_ He looked like a nerd you might find hanging around Perceptor or the data archives, and not at _all_ the handsome, high-class mech he really was..

    Again he pulled off the glasses and tried to focus his vision, he even tried squinting - but everything remained blurry. He tried to manually adjust it but the exhausted mechanisms gave quiet futile clicks and a dull ache in response.

    “Are you _really_ trying to see if you can get by without those things? Forget it, you need them. Or would you rather risk all the lovely injuries that could be caused to yourself and your fellow Autobots otherwise?”

    Tracks starred up blankly at the condescending white blob.

    “I'm serious, don't expect me to repair any damage you inflict on yourself by not wearing them. I don't care how bad it is, you can deal with it yourself for ignoring the doctor's orders, and if you end up hurting anyone _else_ for the sake of your looks you’ll need more than a medic when I’m done with you. Now, I have _more important matters_ to deal with than a _whiny little-”_

    “ _I get it, thank you.”_ Tracks interrupted, looking down to the spectacles again. Reluctantly he put them back on, just in time to see Ratchet round the corner in a huff.

    He dropped back down on the medical berth, sighing deeply and allowing himself a minute to sulk.

    This **sucked.**

\---

    “And you'd rather deal with glasses than just change your eye color?” Raoul smirked.

    “Naturally. Besides, I've taken a liking to them. They're rather charming, aren't they? Or maybe they only seem that way because I make _everything_ look good.”

    His human friend laughed.

    “Yeah, right. Think you could pull _that_ off? He asked, pointing back out the window to a man wearing a faded yellowish-green tweed jacket decorated with red pinstripes over a light blue button up shirt. His glasses, not nearly as sleek or slim as the narcissistic Autobot's own, were large, gleaming disks that might look better suited under a teacup.

 _“Yikes._ ” He adjusted his glasses again. “Fair enough Raoul, maybe not _that_.”

**Author's Note:**

> okay i wanna explain the prosthetic eyes thing because i cant shut up: someone in the TFA fandom theorized that bots with yellow eyes had their eyes replaced at some point (namely Jetfire, who had blue eyes prior to the refinery incident), and that (much like other sensitive biological components like t-cogs in TFP) replacements are very hard to make and they can only be made in yellow. then i figured that in a time of war, especially one so long and destructive it took out cybertron itself, they probably wouldn't even have the resources to synthesize prosthetic eyes, so any bots with optical injuries sustained during the war are either just totally blind or have glasses. this is a lot of headcanon-ing to explain why i draw tracks with glasses but i have a lot of free time and a lot of love for the concept thanks for coming to my TED talk


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